


Lysistrata? I Hardly Know Her!

by tomato_greens



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-08 14:22:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15932255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: Sometimes you can’t get what you want until you can’t get what you want.





	Lysistrata? I Hardly Know Her!

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Usually, I try to keep these things short. Sorry in advance. Warnings for the fic: minor homophobia, minor misogyny, and what could potentially feel like coercive intimacy (although I didn’t write it that way, and I don’t read it that way).
> 
> 2) Some background: I just moved 3,000 miles away from my entire social sphere and my job teaching English and history in an alternative high school in order to attend graduate school for, LOL, writing. Related: I love talking about writing, whether mine or others’; I welcome criticism of my writing and would love to talk about it or the comic or whatever with you!
> 
> 3) Please click on the links. Try reading the works aloud. Savor! Don’t implicitly trust Bitty’s opinions—on literature, but maybe on anything. For example, Li Qingzhao was a woman. Bitty is not a reliable narrator.
> 
> 4) [Some](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Wevfw_Nxk) [songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXI5Nuz6OHg) [that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=truzy5iOUKM) [were](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7HjBr_QMXI) [instrumental](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggoeWxrJTY4) (ha ha) [in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4KuKhJeJuI) [making](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S622IPgL-TE) [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioYYLkurgSQ) [happen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0hQJCkclc). 
> 
> 5) A little more background: after a series of painful and kind of like cosmically horrible family deaths between August 2017 and March 2018, I lost it for a while and read _[Agamemnon](http://www.open.ac.uk/people/sites/www.open.ac.uk.people/files/files/aeschylus-agamemnon-definitive.pdf)_ and _[The Bakkhai](http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/euripides/bacchaehtml.html)_ in about four different versions each, plus a spate of other Greek tragedies besides. In addition, I’ve been reading James Davidson’s snarky academic text, _[Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo11541590.html)_ , and watching Hannah Gadsby’s now-famous _[Nanette](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8465676/)_. As all red-blooded Americans raised in the postmodern era, I’m not that interested in [Aristotelian unities](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities), but I would suggest this fic follows the unity of action (ha ha) pretty closely; some other useful concepts for this fic that exploded with new meaning for me upon getting really, deeply, embarrassingly into Greek plays include _[catharsis](https://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/#H3)_ , _[hamartia](https://literarydevices.net/hamartia/)_ , and _[hubris](http://theatreofancientgreece.blogspot.com/2014/11/hubris-or-hybris.html)._ In _Sex and the City_ terms, Bitty thinks he’s an [Antigone](https://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/antigone_2.pdf) but he’s actually an [Orestes](http://www.open.ac.uk/people/sites/www.open.ac.uk.people/files/files/eumenides-definitive.pdf). 
> 
> 6) Maaany thanks to [firewordsparkler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firewordsparkler), who I’d met at a curator friend’s exhibit and didn’t realize was in CP fandom until she came up with the word “orgasmaganza” while sitting on the living room floor with me at another mutual friend’s party a few weeks ago. Extra extreme-o thank you to you to the best and most supportive enabler I’ve ever had the pleasure of forcing to read every paragraph I write as I write it, [familiar](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/familiar). Every thought I’ve ever had about Bitty since 2016 has been influenced by [familiar](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/familiar)’s brilliant fic [get the wine pairings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7341604).
> 
> 7) While writing this fic, I jokingly-but-in-desperation referred to it as “an assfucking tragicomedy,” which is exactly what it is. So, you know, take or it leave it.

Bitty never meant to put off his last core requirement until the second semester of his senior year, but packing sack lunches for a professional hockey player (plus carefully including on a slightly irregular schedule—to promote a binge-inducing sense of scarcity—just the right number of wax paper packets, labeled in a fine hand and filled with pecan-lace cookies or hazelnut bars or occasionally individual mini-pies, to ensure that said professional hockey player won Best Looking in FalcsTV’s mid-season revue) meant he skipped every meeting with his dean until he got a warning e-mail in October that he would not eligible for graduation unless he took World Lit 201 in the spring.

“Excuse me,” Bitty said as he entered Dean Espinoza’s office, showing off the sparkling veneers he’d had installed in high school and handing her a charmingly arranged basket of Earl Grey shortbread and custard creams, “I’m an American Studies major? I don’t think I have to take World Lit, right? It doesn’t seem like it would really serve any purpose four years in, right?” 

“Hello, Mr. Bittle,” Dean Espinoza said back. “What a lovely...gingham concoction you have here. Let’s take a look at your account, shall we? What’s that student number of yours?”

Bitty had to pull out his phone to find it, scrolling through three and a half years of e-mails, by which point Dean Espinoza had already worked her registrar magic and was frowning at her own computer screen. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take the class, hon,” she said. Her nails were bright pink and a little too long than was really professional, Bitty thought. “DegreeNavigator is telling me that it’s the only one this semester that will fulfill that requirement for you.”

“You can override DegreeNavigator, can’t you?” Bitty said, gesturing at the custard creams again: Dean Espinoza clearly enjoyed her desserts, given the fit of that Nordstrom Rack discount blouse, and there was really no reason she hadn’t taken one yet. “You’re a dean, after all. That’s a very high up position within a college, isn’t it?”

“Even I can’t get override your basic degree requirements, Mr. Bittle,” she said, and at last took a bite of a cookie. “Oh, I should have asked, is this lemon? I’m allergic to—”

After the ambulance arrived, the EMTs wanted the basket of cookies to the hospital along with Dean Espinoza in case they needed to test for anything. “It was just lemon extract! This basket was my late Moomaw’s!” Bitty shouted, only partially lying and holding onto the basket’s braided handle for dear life. The EMT must have been imbued with some kind of supernatural power, though, or else she saw a weakness in Bitty’s grip and took advantage of the fact that he wouldn’t hit a woman, because she ruthlessly yanked it from him. “You can pick it up from Memorial if you really need it,” she said through her resting bitch face, disappearing into the back of the back of the ambulance so he couldn’t even get in the last word.

“And the worst part is I’m still in this stupid class,” Bitty moaned to Jack over Skype that night, lying face down with his nose tucked into Señor Bun’s back.

“What, buddy? I can’t understand you,” Jack said.

“A class filled the brim with pimply-faced ass-breathing overeager freshmen who probably love books and want to write essays for fun!” Bitty shrieked.

“You’re still all muffled,” Jack said.

“I have to write a 10-page final about world literature at the same time as I’m finishing my stupid thesis,” Bitty finished, and collapsed dramatically in on himself as well as his prone position would allow.

“Bitty?” Jack said, sounding alarmed. “Bitty?”

“What,” Bitty snapped, popping upright to glare at the Skype screen.

Jack looked pale and jagged, though that was probably just the shitty quality of the Skype call. “You okay, Bits?”

“No! Obviously not. What have I just spent the past fifteen minutes telling you?” 

Jack sent him a Le Creuset mini cocotte collection in eight colors as an apology for not listening, which calmed Bitty down and reminded him that, after all, he’d gotten decent grades in freshman writing seminar and a geology class he’d literally slept through, so he would probably survive this last indignity before he could finally graduate and start fixing up Jack’s bachelor pad condo into a livable condition. 

The class wasn’t as horrible as Bitty expected; the professor, who introduced herself as simply Maryam without any acronyms or honorifics or anything, was young and energetic, and yapped about cultural and global literacy for twenty minutes before handing out the syllabi and letting them go early. As a group, the class stumbled their way through [Gilgamesh](https://ia800400.us.archive.org/8/items/TheEpicofGilgamesh_201606/eog.pdf)’s weirdly gay exploits and incomprehensible poetry by some ancient Chinese guy named [Li Qingzhao](http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp013_li_qingzhao.pdf) before they finally landed back in Bitty’s comfort zone; he remembered plenty of Greek mythology from sixth grade, and he read the first Percy Jackson book with his young cousins a few years ago. 

_idk if percy jackson will help u with aristophanes tbh_ , Lardo texted him back, _but u want me to look through Shitty’s gross old papers and see if he kept notes from when he took this class?_

 _y!!!!_ Bitty responded, and a few hours later received a PDF dump, the pages, from their scratchy quality, clearly scanned straight to Lardo’s phone. Bitty knew for a fact that Shitty owned a printer with a high quality scanner on it which would surely have led to a more readable set of notes, but not everyone was as devoted to gracious giving as Bitty, which was fine. Not everyone was raised with his mother’s highest expectations, after all. _thx, gurl_ , he sent. 

_get em tiger_ , she said, with a string of largely irrelevant emoji after it. Bitty typically preferred to craft coherent narratives with his emoji, but given her artistic background, he could understand that Lardo couldn’t help but take an avant garde approach.

“The play’s about sex!” Bitty gasped to Jack later that night on their usual Skype call. After trudging through the first few dreary pages of _[Lysistrata](https://lcsl.uic.edu/docs/default-source/classics/the-original-ancient-text.pdf?sfvrsn=0)_ , which sounded an awful lot like Bitty’s mother when she complained about the bra strap-snapping and midriff-baring habits of Aunt Judy’s sluttish daughters, he’d given up the translation in disgust and skimmed Shitty’s notes instead. Turned out the half-naked doodles were more relevant in literature classes than when they showed up on the grocery suggestions he used to leave taped on the fridge. 

“Oh yeah? Haha,” said Jack, “that’s pretty funny.”

“I guess the Greeks got it on, too,” Bitty mused, eyeing his cuticles and wondering whether he ought to brush a little almond oil on them. 

“I actually took a class about that for my degree,” Jack said, and started talking about Alexander the Great’s best friend or something while Bitty nodded encouragingly at appropriate intervals and performed some routine maintenance on his dry skin: the almond oil first, obviously, then some Burt’s bees for the embarrassing dry skin around his knuckles, then—“Oh, wow, honey, that’s really interesting”—some clear strengthening nail polish he’d picked up for seven dollars at the CVS next to Murder Stop&Shop. 

“So that’s why some scholars suggested they were lovers, rather than brothers at arms,” Jack concluded, his tone of voice rich with the profound finality that meant it was time for Bitty to tune back into the conversation. 

“Who knew those Greeks had so much happening!” Bitty said. 

“Seriously,” Jack agreed, then remained awkward and silent as Bitty put a tasteful matte topcoat over his ad hoc manicure. Bitty could see that he was going to have to retrain Jack in the art of conversational segues, but that would have to wait until after graduation, because there was simply no way Bitty would be able to focus on creating situationally enticing positive reinforcement with all these musty old Greeks on the brain. “So, this summer—”

Bitty’s phone started buzzing. “Ugh, that’s my mom. I gotta go, sweetheart,” he said, automatically blowing a kiss to Jack before he remembered the topcoat wasn’t fast-drying and then irritably shaking his hand as he hung up on Jack and put his mom on speakerphone. “Hey, Mama.”

“Hey, baby,” his mother said, launching immediately into a breathtaking diatribe about Aunt Judy’s Slut the Younger, who had recently begun making jams of her own that were by no means as delicious and thoughtful as either of ours, Dickie, but that were nonetheless better than Judy’s, and how this was going to play out in two months at Easter dinner, which by the way, are you coming home for that or are you planning on sneaking to Canada again with that monstrous brute of yours?

“He’s not a brute,” Bitty said, “he’s a very refined young man who appreciates your secret recipe for a champagne vinaigrette and who thought he told you he wouldn’t talk to you anymore if you continued being like this.”

“I don’t see what you mean,” his mother sniffed. “I’m merely being protective of my only child!”

“Your only child is an adult man!”

“If you think twenty-two is an adult, then that only proves how young you are!”

“What is this, Recursive Logic Day?”

“Eric Richard Bittle, are you trying to rub it in my face that I was only able to get an Associate’s at your age, when I’ve sacrificed everything for you so that you’d be able to do something in the world?”

“Just what exactly have you sacrificed, Mama?” 

“Everything, Dickie, everything! And what are you doing, mister? Lollygagging with your classes, joking on Twitter about making pies instead of writing your thesis? What exactly do you think Samwell is, just a place to get your—your $80,000 MRS degree?” 

“Oh, is that what this is about? I’m reading _Lysistrata,_ if you even know what that is, so I wouldn’t exactly say I’m slacking off. Be honest, Mother, you just don’t like Jack because he’s better off than Coach was at his age, and you’re jealous!”

“How dare you suggest that I’d ever be jealous of my own son—I just want what’s best for you, Dickie, and if you think I want to see my bright and beautiful son’s future sidelined by press about that man and his ill-gotten millions, you’re sorely mistaken!”

“Ill-gotten? What are you talking about?” 

“At least your father is a self-made man instead of a second-best tryhard with unresolved Daddy issues,” his mother spat out, unexpectedly, viciously. The silence stretched between them. “Besides, I clipped that vinaigrette recipe from Martha Stewart’s magazine and you know it,” she hissed, and hung up the phone.

Bitty considered his nails, which remained mostly unsmudged despite his accidental death grip on Señor Bun. They’d had worse conversations, all told. 

The semester continued largely unmarred by other disasters, as long as one didn’t count Bitty’s regrettable midterm grade in World Lit 201, which, as a class, Bitty counted as infrequently as possible. He’d arrived at his desk, answered the multiple choice with some sense of authority, opened his Blue Book, and gone totally blank when confronted by the essay question: _How did Lysistrata justify the women’s actions within the play? What social implications do their actions hold? Use at least two examples to support your answer, and feel free to reference class lectures._ He knew he had not deserved a 70 for his panicked response, _They were actually all lesbians,_ though Maryam had winked at him when she was handing back exams at the end of the following class and said, too loudly, “Solidarity, Bittle. You might want to check out my queer theory course in the fall.” Bitty had taken the booklets from her, fought back an irrational impulse to curtsy or something equally embarrassing, and fled. 

“Never do I ever have to look at this stupid play again!” he cried later that evening, two beers in and transcendent with freedom. 

“At least until the final!” Chowder shouted back at him. 

“Until the final!” Bitty agreed, downing a cup of jungle juice someone had helpfully put into his hand. He tossed the stupid volume, along with its stupid foreword and its stupider critical readings, into the green couch. Books had been lost there before, and books would be lost there again, thank the Lord in all his mercies, Amen. 

Easter was an icy affair, even though in an act of true noble sacrifice Bitty polished all 247 pieces of his mother’s First Love silverplate service in addition to the 182 pieces of her Eloquence pattern backup flatware, even though he attended to each tarnished strawberry fork and ice cream spoon by hand rather than dumping them into a salt bath and using the old aluminum foil and baking soda trick. He followed by organizing her three individual transferware sets, cleaning out the leftover VHS shelf in the cellar, and, in one last desperate bid at not having to talk about this, carefully rewiring her third-favorite lamp, which Jack had knocked over in his first visit to the house and which no one had ever gotten around to fixing.

“Glad to see you think I can’t keep a tidy, functioning house!” she said, upon receiving the lamp. What a petty bitch. Bitty couldn’t help but admire it a little.

Still, it was a blessing that Aunt Judy’s Slut the Elder distracted everyone when she showed up to Easter dinner wearing a #BLM shirt and a septum piercing, refusing to eat the glazed ham on account of having become a pescatarian two weeks ago. She’d graduated from SUNY Hunter a couple of years ago, and was still living it up in New York as some kind of publisher’s assistant/waitress/low-class escort; the details were unclear. The undeniable proof of what college away could do to unsuspecting virgins from Athens, and the kind of selfish debauchery that Bitty had bravely denied himself, seemed to thaw by a single degree his mother’s frozen column of a spine. At least Bitty had a decent prospect—Slut the Elder, upon the suggestion that her piercing would prevent a pretty girl like her from meeting the kind of boy she should be looking for, delivered a brief lecture on the oppressive shackles of marriage (even throwing the clearly made-up word “homonormativity” at Bitty! like he had anything to do with this!) before pushing away from the table and stomping outside to hide behind the phalanx of minivans arranged in the driveway. 

“I think she’s smoking dope out there!” Moomaw shrieked from her vantage point, peering through the sideroom’s blinds. Suzanne caught Bitty’s eyes and crinkled her nose at him in expectation of their mutual judgment: the traditional symbol of her forgiveness. After Moomaw’s coffee cake and the weighty agglomeration of seven pies—Suzanne, Judy, and Slut the Younger vying silently for the Husbands’ Favorite Slice crown—plus an easy three dozen of Bitty’s best five-layer cookie bars, Bitty slipped away as Slut the Younger was sent to load the dishwasher with forks and then wash in the sink the various handed-down transferware platters that were deemed too delicate for modern technology. 

Slut the Elder, alas, was not smoking dope after all, but did have a battered pack of menthols that she was willing to share. “Seriously, Eric,” she said, breathing out smoke in long tendrils. “I don’t know how you put up with all that bullshit they put us through.” 

Bitty shrugged modestly as he lit up. 

“I always thought you were so brave, acting like you do,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?” 

“Oh, you know,” she sighed, though he didn’t. “Yourself. Unapologetic.” There was something strange in her voice. An unidentifiable note. Longing? Regret?

“Hmmm,” said Bitty. 

“You even talk about Beyoncé’s outfits to Moomaw,” Slut the Elder continued, like that explained anything. Bitty abruptly recognized the change in her voice—it wasn’t emotion at all; she was still dampening her accent, like she thought she was at brunch with her friends in Hell’s Kitchen or wherever think-they’re-hot young assistants/waitresses/low-class escorts with septum piercings gathered for bottomless mimosas. 

“I read, too,” Bitty offered, after finally deciding he was a little offended. “I even read _Lysistrata_ this semester.”

“Aw, that’s fucking hilarious!” Slut the Elder said, ambiguous enough that Bitty stamped on his half a menthol—just in case Slut the Elder had any ideas about saving the butt—and headed inside to make himself another cup of coffee.

After Slut the Younger proved the upset and won the Husbands’ Favorite Slice Silent Oblivious Auction, Easter wrapped up pretty quickly, and soon enough Bitty was on a plane back to Massachusetts, richer by a stale packet of Peeps on which to gnaw anxiously and a new sour cherry filling recipe Slut the Younger had promised to text him. 

_too much cornstarch!_ he wrote, forwarding the recipe to his mother. _can’t believe Coach and everybody loved it._

 _Men! They haven’t got any taste,_ his mother sent back. _Good luck finishing the semester, sweetheart._

Bitty returned to a strangely empty Haus on Monday afternoon, sent Jack and his mother a quick emoji-laden status update, and fell into bed, completely overcome with remaindered weariness. His family was impossible. He couldn’t wait until Jack invited him to move in this summer—

—unless—

—it was already April—

—unless Jack wasn’t going to ask at all?

Bitty tried, unsuccessfully, to convince himself that he’d merely been taken hold of by exhaustion-induced pessimism. Distantly, he heard the door slam and an uncertain assortment of frogs start to yell, so he took a throw pillow in one hand and Señor Bun in the other, and pressed them into his skull. The pressure didn’t feel good, but it felt better than the possibility that he’d have to move back in with his parents instead of directly into Jack’s bedroom. Already he felt his anticipated self-congratulatory post-graduation orgasmaganza recede from him. No! No! It wasn’t fair!

There had to be something he could do to belay disaster. There had to be a—a plan, or a scheme, some kind of program he could employ. Bitty was rarely methodical outside of the kitchen, but he knew he had within himself the kind of meticulous and obsessive attention to detail that had won his mother three straight Miss Canning awards between 1988 and 1990 at the Georgia-Carolina State Fair, not to mention a follow-up second place in the 1997 [china painting competition](http://www.georgiacarolinastatefair.com/china-painting-exhibit/). She still labeled all the jars she sent to Aunt Judy and the Sluts as “Suze’s Gold Prize Preserves,” and kept the ribbons tucked away above the fridge, where she could discreetly pull them out for praise or intimidation, as-needed. That was the kind of dedication Bitty needed to make sure Jack wasn’t going to wriggle out of the informal arrangement Bitty had been sure was growing between them for the past year. 

But of the two of them, what did Bitty have to offer? Bitty was aware of what his fluttering lashes could do to a certain kind of broad and usually hairy man with a protective streak, but Jack was at least as cute as he was, even if he was on a different part of the aesthetic spectrum. That ass, for one thing. Those eyes, for another! Bitty had never had to worry too much about money, but Jack was literally a millionaire, and Bitty’s money was all really his parents’—so what was he going to do, offer Jack a gay dowry? Like that would go over better than the time in fourth grade when he’d asked his mother whether he would inherit pieces from her trousseau just like Slut the Younger, who wasn’t yet a slut, would inherit some family lace from Aunt Judy. And while Bitty knew he carried himself with an unusual lithe grace, Jack was a professional athlete with access to the finest trainers and bland chicken diets in the world. All that Bitty really had going for him was how well he choked on dick, and what good was that going to do anybody?

Something small and tense unlocked in the back of Bitty’s brain.

Of course. Of course! The Greeks had been right all along. 

Jack wasn’t a demonstrative man, but there was no question that he liked sex with Bitty—his face turned as red as his dick, and he’d open his unspeaking mouth as Bitty drooled all over his nearly-matted pubic hair and balls. Sometimes he’d wipe at Bitty’s wet chin, or tug on his hair like it was a handle, lifting Bitty nearly off his dick until Bitty slapped him away and redoubled his efforts. Sometimes he’d try to get his mouth on Bitty’s dick, but his face was always screwed up in a weird grimace, and Bitty could tell when a man was just being polite. So Bitty went down on Jack, and, though he liked it much less, turned over for him, waggling his hips enticingly, until Jack let out a sigh of relief and stuck it in him the way red-blooded professional hockey players all wanted to.

But Bitty remembered the conversation he’d overheard Aunt Judy and his mother have with Slut the Elder when she first moved from the Tiny Peach to the Big Apple: as long as she kept her garden gate safely closed, the gardener had all the power. Well, Bitty’s garden gate had been flapping loose in the breeze ever since he’d handed Jack the key and a handful of pre-lubed Trojans he’d swiped from the student infirmary. Clearly it was time to change the locks, at least temporarily, and give Jack a taste of what he’d be missing if Bitty had to go back to Georgia in May. 

It was clear. It was a little cruel. It was perfect. Bitty felt a lot better about everything, and settled into a nap before his Lit class at four o’clock.

After suffering through Maryam’s lecture on the _[Bhagavad-Gita](http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b17771201.pdf)_ , none of the assigned reading from which he had completed during spring break, Bitty returned the Haus feeling as though Easter had been little more than a bad dream. He dumped his bag on his bed and wandered down the kitchen to think about puff pastries, or maybe Russian tea cookies, depending on how much butter there was. 

“Oh, hey, Bitty,” Tango said from the kitchen table, where he was hunched over a partially eaten slice of pie and Bitty’s now-tattered Aristophanes anthology. “Thish ish pretty good shtill.” He took another forkful of the pie with an eye-watering slush of sound. 

“Oh my word, Tango, did you even defrost that?”

“It’sh good cold,” Tango assured Bitty through his wet chewing sounds. “Do you need help with that shtep shtool?”

“I’m fine, hon,” Bitty promised as he balanced on his toes to pull down the mixing bowls and the dry ingredients for snickerdoodles, since they were out of nearly everything else.

“Thish is a cool book,” Tango said a while later, after Bitty had slipped, caught himself by slamming stomach-first into the counter, and spilled most of a bottle of imitation vanilla extract onto the once-white linoleum—thank God, frankly; one of the boys had bought the sixteen ounce container at Racist Stop&Shop and Bitty had been trying to offload it for months. “Can you believe shomeone jusht left it inshide the couch during a kegshter or shomething?”

“How weird is that,” Bitty said peaceably, and cut Tango another frozen slice on his way to find the mop bucket.

Getting back into the swing of classes after a week away was always difficult, especially now that Bitty was having to submit drafts of his stupid thesis like he really cared about the evolution of the cookbook from semi-oppressive necessity to sexy status symbol between 1950 and 2000. Jack had actually come up with most of the idea after listening to Bitty’s furious ranting back in the fall, and Bitty figured, since they were probably getting married anyway, that if they could share a life and Jack’s salary, they could certainly share an idea. 

Jack didn’t seem to mind, though maybe that was just because he was focused on the season—after their unexpected Cup victory the year before, it was statistically improbable that the Falcs would play into the final rounds of the season, but they were sure trying. Jack had gotten that hollowed look most of the late-season hockey players sported, as though there simply wasn’t enough fuel in the world to make up the calories he was expending during his twenty nightly minutes on the ice. Something about the frailty of Jack’s cut-glass cheekbones and his rough, swollen biceps really did it for Bitty, but he steeled his resolve not to let the conversation devolve into its usual frantic masturbation. 

“You look tired,” Bitty said.

“I am tired,” Jack admitted. He had little empty pockets underneath his eyes, the only unfortunate consequence of the cheekbones. Bitty wanted, vaguely but insistently, to lick them, and then had to get himself back in line. Keep your eye on the prize, he told himself. “Seems like this season is taking longer than normal. I keep forgetting you’re graduating in a month.”

“A month and a half,” Bitty said defensively, though they were long past April’s halfway point and it really was closer to thirty days, now.

“How’s that thesis?”

“Ugh,” Bitty answered, the only appropriate response when paired with the most extravagant eyeroll he could manage. “Almost done, I guess. It’s horrible. But it’s better than the stupid stuff I’m reading in that freshman class.”

“I never liked international literature either.”

“Not enough hockey?”

“Haha,” Jack said agreeably. “ _Huis Clos_ was okay, and that didn’t have hockey.”

“I love it when you speak French,” Bitty purred, mostly true except when Jack got annoyed. Without the well-hung carrot of Skype sex dangling before him, though, the gnawing anxiety of the year—the uncertainty of their cohabitation, the airport security lines separating them, the fucking thesis—was too much to bear. “I’m so tired,” he hinted.

“You ought to get more sleep, Bits,” Jack said as he usually did, but he didn’t hang up. So like a man. Unwilling to take responsibility for the smallest decision. 

“I guess I’d better,” Bitty said, and pressed the little red button. His tablet was old and starting to fade, and the flickering pressure of his finger caused an eerie distortion to ripple through the screen. Had Jack even noticed that Bitty hadn’t given it up? But that brought up other questions, harder ones, and uglier. Had Bitty been giving it up all this time for no reason beyond the obvious slick pleasure? Lord, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Bitty was practiced in mental sleight-of-hand, primarily due to his believe that unpleasantness was, with rare exceptions, an opt-in symptom. His advisor had several times pointedly referred him to CAPS’ free meditation seminars, but as a rule Bitty only held with fads when they involved booty shorts or were advertised by someone with more than 500K subscribers on a respectable platform.

He tucked the tablet in his nightstand’s drawer, and stashed along with it his worry about Jack, the low fizzing arousal he’d been ignoring during their conversation, what his mother would say if she knew how many blow jobs he’d tallied in the Google Sheets file he kept for his own records, and every single concern and frustration he had about his thesis and whether or not he’d be able to graduate on time, as well as the growing and semi-horrible certainty that SMH wasn’t going to make it to the Frozen Four this year.

Bitty had found, upon adopting the mantle of captain and accepting with it the fervent adoration of Ford, that it wasn’t as different from being a regular ol’ team favorite had been, except with slightly fewer condescending top-of-the-head pats from other players. He baked for the team, gave them pep talks, strategized with the fourth liners in order to bring them up to speed, ran a few suicide drills, organized a few kegsters, but frankly, he had been fulfilling most of these duties as a clueless frosh, back when he was still desperate to be liked. Perhaps his leadership style was a gentler one than most, perhaps there had been fewer obvious changes in his behavior than might be expected, but after three years of Jack’s hardass nonsense and then another year of Ransom and Holster’s zany but ultimately directionless synergy, Bitty had thought maybe the team needed a calm hand, a guiding hand rather than a forceful one. 

Bitty had never understood Jack’s habit of tearing himself into agonized knots over the performance of his hockey team, but especially not Samwell Men’s Hockey, which despite its Division I designation was clearly a ragtag crew without so much as a coordinated haircut between them. (Bitty wasn’t proud of it, but sometimes he thought about the LAX team’s universal look of casual mix-n-match madras and let out long and gusty sighs of envy.) Jack’s sixpack alone made it obvious that he was willing to sacrifice for his team.

How many NHL players did you even see with a defined sixpack? Not many, though admittedly part of the problem was the virginal essence of the hockey sweater, and that most of the NHL had spent their formative adolescent years being socialized in midwestern or God forbid Canadian billet homes with unfamiliar mothers doing all their embarrassing night-stained laundry. Still, the handful of fully outstretched NHL abs you saw per year usually came from men who were more focused on every last functionality they could eke out of their muscles rather than how well they were treating them or how little subcutaneous fat lay between them and the ice. Jack, like the _Bhagavad-Gita_ , prioritized both form and function. 

So Bitty had always thought that Jack beating himself up over the outcome of a season was unnecessary at best, and selfish at worst. A hockey season was made of a million tiny decisions between thirty people, and only a tiny fraction of those decisions were even conscious. Sure, Bitty could have given more pep talks, or led more weight room sessions, or actually listened to Tango whenever he had girl problems instead of nodding every thirty seconds and offering quotes from recent fortune cookies as advice when Tango paused expectantly. But there were so many factors. He was simply unwilling to believe his choices would have been the deciding element. 

And, just like that, he settled into unexpected peace. Mindfulness schmindfulness! All he needed was to reject any potential discomforts. Mind over matter. The red burn at the pit of his stomach banked. The ragged nerve endings behind his collar bone came, for once, to rest.

Bitty nonetheless woke up late the next morning and ended up hurrying through the week with his head down and his shoulders hunched as a preemptive defense. By Friday he’d brought home dozens of sticks of butter and was determinedly ignoring the odd behavior of the amphibiae, who had started to gather in irregular whispering groups in the Haus’s quieter corners. Back in September when he was newly flush with his responsibilities he might have broken them up or targeted a weak link to figure out what was going on. By now, with among other disasters the possibility of eternal celibacy looming before him, Bitty figured he was doing them a favor in the maturation process by allowing everyone to figure out their own problems. They’d text him if they really needed him. 

The difficulty with pie dough was that it required a light touch. Underwork it and you just had pea-sized lumps of butter and flour, worse than useless; overwork it and you ended up somewhere between tough and mealy, an inedible shell that even the Sluts would look down on, and rightly so. Bitty considered the buzzing tension in his forearms. He wanted to mold or to rend, to remake the world with his hands. No way would pie crusts cut it. Luckily, he’d bought enough butter to feed one of the early colonial farms that had originally populated Samwell. 

Waiting for it to chill in the fridge was an exercise in stiff frustration, but otherwise, laminated dough was a godsend in that it was one of the precious few things on Earth that begged for a beating, scrambled eggs and anyone in a porno with hair grown past their shoulders being the other obvious exceptions. Smacking the butter into thin sheets gave a rhythm to every other part of Bitty’s bodily processes: his heart slowed from its frantic jerk and his breath naturally regulated itself into a smooth in-out-in-out cycle. His shoulders unclenched with audible pops about halfway through, and his spine in grateful alignment straightened suddenly.

“You really like doing that, don’t you?” Tango said, in that remarkable way of his.

“Hmmm,” Bitty said, operating from some other level of perception; he felt like he could see the delicate gluten bonds in the dough as he wrapped it around the butter and couldn’t focus on Tango as an—unfortunate?—result. 

“Because I think if you, um, if you really like hitting—you know, dough—”

“Hmmmm?”

“—then maybe you would be a good person to talk to Whiskey about. You know. Those LAX buddies of his?”

“Buddies,” Bitty repeated, on autopilot.

“You know, those guys he always hangs out with. Well, that one guy. The lacrosse bro, uh, I think his name is Chad but don’t quote me on it.”

“Chad,” Bitty said.

“Yeah, you know, Chad. The one with the—” and out of the corner of Bitty’s eye he could see Tango attempt to communicate something evidently unspeakable through an indecipherable hand semaphore. “The thing.”

“The thing,” Bitty said.

“Yes, yeah, exactly! Wow, Bitty, you really get what I’m trying to say?” 

“Hmmmm,” Bitty said.

“Yeah, if you sound judgmental just like that I bet you’ll whip Chad into submission in—uhhhh—no time. Or. You know. Whatever you’re into.”

“Submission,” Bitty said, resuming his battery on the butter. 

“Yep!” Tango said, giving Bitty a double thumbs up, and backed out of the kitchen, running out to perform whatever bizarre rituals the various stages of amphibiae were into these days. 

Bitty had just stuck the dough back in the fridge to cool for a while when Whiskey sauntered into the kitchen, his joints springy and loose the way only tall young men’s are before they fill out with adult bulk. “Hi,” Bitty said pointedly, after several minutes in which he had cleaned the counters and Whiskey had failed to do anything but stand there and watch him, in an arrogant tilt against the wall. 

“Hi,” Whiskey answered. 

“Can I...help you?” Bitty offered in an opening salvo.

“I don’t know.”

“Oka-a-ay.” Bitty was forever helping young men who didn’t know how to help themselves, but he wasn’t a meddler, whatever Tango might think. When Bitty saw a problem, he fixed it. But Whiskey’s grades were fine, his hockey was improving and had flashes of real brilliance, and as far as Bitty could tell he wasn’t harboring any sinful festering secrets—

—oh. Is that what Tango had been talking about? Well, Bitty wouldn’t have guessed it, Whiskey’s well-blended undercut aside; but Bitty really was the best person on the team to talk to about this kind of thing, considering the other options. 

“You know you can talk to me about anything, right, hon?”

“I guess,” Whiskey said. 

“Like, anything. You don’t have to be ashamed around me, all right?” Bitty thought he might be losing Whiskey, whose eyebrows were shooting upwards, so he put a hand on Whiskey’s forearm and squeezed warmly. “I know about all sorts of—well. Just. All sorts, okay?”

“Hmm,” said Whiskey. “I didn’t know this was what Tango meant.”

“Tango? Oh, he’s a great kid, but he’s not like us,” Bitty said, laughing and waving at the space between them, trying to express their fundamental similarity. 

“Yeah,” said Whiskey, putting his hand on Bitty’s wrist and holding onto it for a second before lifting Bitty’s arm up, like Bitty was his lighthouse in a port of storm. For a second Bitty felt bad about being preoccupied as a captain from the smaller vagaries of life as an underclassman; he should have seen the signs! He should have reached out earlier! But then, everyone had to come to terms with their identities on their own timeline. “I have to think about it, okay?”

“Oh, you know I’d never want to force anyone into anything before they were ready,” Bitty enthused. 

“That’s good,” Whiskey said, weirdly intent, before making his way back out of the kitchen.

The croissants came out great, crisply layered and golden, and were gone practically as soon as Bitty put them out to cool. Bitty surveyed the destruction happily. So he hadn’t been the best captain of all time, so he hadn’t been elected three years in a row; so his thesis sucked; so his boyfriend hadn’t asked him to move in yet; so his mother couldn’t stop throwing hints at him about coming back to Georgia after graduating; so Slut the Elder had sent him a strange Facebook message about coming to visit Boston with her roommate, except she’d called the roommate her girlfriend, thereby spinning Bitty into a tailspin as to whether it was just that expression girls sometimes used or whether he hadn’t been the gay cousin all along—so what! He could provide for his boys.

“All right, kids, buckle in and get ready for the last book of the semester,” Maryam said as a kick-off to her next World Lit lecture as she arranged her papers on the beat-up podium. “We’re not even reading the whole thing, since that would probably kill all of you in one fell swoop and then I’d be arrested, and English professors aren’t exactly known for doing well in jail, all right? We’ll just be looking at excerpts.”

 _[The Pillow Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillow_Book)_ was, thank God, not as sexy as it sounded—it was more like a diary than anything else, although nothing like the diary Bitty had filled with crumpled cut-outs from the Lands End catalogue and shoved under his mattress—but its very existence implied the author’s previous moments of intimacy. Lord, Bitty had never considered his garden overgrown, even if the gate had been more or less tenderly opened by Jack, but now he started to wonder about himself. The garden was barren all of a sudden for the first time since Bitty had first allowed seedlings to sprout, and Bitty was shocked to find that nothing else would fill it—no croissant was flaky enough, no pie sweet enough. He was nervous even to speculate about another conversation with Jack. _Was_ there a fundamental weakness in the homosexual, as Uncle Bill had typically liked to speculate after Thanksgiving and Easter dinners? 

Bitty reached the Haus still deep in thought, swung open the door, and upon being greeted by an unspeakable series of body parts, had to conclude that if there was a fundamental weakness, it was in the male species as a whole, or maybe in hockey players. “Is that a stick of _my_ butter?” he screeched, clapping his hands over his eyes and edging towards the stairs, unwilling to see any more. “On that _fucking couch?_ Which is not supposed to be a fucking couch, by the way!”

His trembling, outstretched hand found terra slightly firma in the banister, and he swung himself up the stairs before curiosity or—or any other impulse could convince him to investigate the jiggling nether regions that his frontal lobe, at least, preferred remain unknown. He wasn’t entirely sure who he’d seen, and he firmly set aside his brain’s attempt to run the flopping asses he’d seen against the inevitable mental Rolodex that accompanied four years in a locker room with the same people. It wasn’t his business. 

A glimpse of the forbidden had started his stomach roiling, though, in the half-sick pleasure that he usually felt when Jack pulled out the KY and stared at it for the hard second that was his habit. In the strange scraped-bare space he’d found in place of Jack’s greasy cock, he realized that what he really liked about fucking was Jack, like, outside of Jack’s clumsy jabbing that never hit wherever he was trying to aim, outside of his weirdly nasal grunting and his clenched fists. Actually taking it up the ass was anticlimactic at best, at least compared to those guys who came untouched in the half-hour staged dramas that Jack liked to watch when he needed help getting in the mood. 

“Bitty,” said an indeterminate voice at the door. Not Canadian, at least, which narrowed the field a bit. “Bitty? Are you in there? Can I explain?”

“Nobody’s home,” Bitty called back, digging in his nightstand for his tablet. Given the time difference, Jack was probably taking his pre-game nap, but maybe Bitty could catch him during the sandwich part of the proceedings. 

“Bitty,” said the voice, sounding anguished. Bitty didn’t let himself respond, because on all the daytime TV he and the Sluts had consumed over spring break, Dr. Phil kept emphasizing the importance of caretakers putting themselves first, and for once Bitty had decided to put on his own oxygen mask before his teammates’. Footsteps in the hallway dragged away from his door, and Bitty paused with his finger hovering over Jack’s Skype icon. The pit of his stomach lurched. He ran over to the door, feeling guilt like a sudden weight from his collarbones, but it was too late; the hallway was empty, and his thumb had called Jack whether he liked it or not. 

“Bitty?” Jack called to Bitty’s hip, sounding confused. “You okay, bud?”

“Oh, hi, sweetie,” Bitty said, bringing Jack’s face up to his own; Jack’s eyebrows were furrowed in something between sleep and confusion. “I’m fine, I just—I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“I guess I just miss you, is all.”

“Aw, Bittle,” Jack said, his forehead smoothing out as his eyes started to crinkle slightly. Jack was now closer to thirty than not, Bitty remembered. What would their lives look like by then? What about when Bitty was thirty—would Bitty still be climbing back into his bed alone, withholding the rites and rights of their now-legal marriage bed to try to get Jack to do what he wanted? But there was no other way; that was the thorny knot at the heart of the issue. “I miss you, too.”

“Do you?” Bitty asked, plaintive, suddenly wanting Jack to be wrapped around him with his hands spanning the small of Bitty’s back. “That’s good to hear.”

“I always miss you,” Jack says. His eyelashes were very long. Bitty tried to imagine not waking up next to them, or waking up next to them without having felt them against the back of his neck the night before, and the hollow in his garden grew darker and emptier. “Bittle, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Bitty said, and kissed his fingertips before reaching out to touch the screen. “Get some sleep, you hear? Be a good boyfriend and play good tonight for me.”

“Wait, Bittle,” Jack said. Bitty watched his own hand press the button to end the call. Jack immediately called back, so Bitty zipped the tablet into its soft case without answering and flung himself onto the bed with his hands above his head. They had talked, without making real plans, about the edgier elements—ropes, buckles, an electric shock now and again, that kind of thing. Bitty had nodded along, assuming that Kent Parson or Camilla Collins or PornHub or some other as-yet-secret fiend in Jack’s sexual history had introduced him to the addictive dark underworld of sadomasochism. Bitty pictured Jack tying his hands to the headboard and got stuck on the way Jack’s face sometimes settled into absolute neutrality when they were getting deep into it, on the rare occasions that Jack let him turn over onto his back first. 

Maybe this was how all long term relationships went. A year or two of sexual chemistry, or at a minimum sexual compatibility, followed by forty years of passion fizzled dry. There were things other than sex, of course, that made love worth pursuing; otherwise there was no way forty-year-olds humped through the day and came home to their spouse’s Plantar’s warts and chin hairs without then killing themselves on their Bob’s discount sectional. 

Closing his eyes didn’t help. The warm darkness just dissolved more easily into Jack’s straight pinkish slash of a mouth, tooth-bitten and grim. Bitty could see as if it were happening the parallel strong lines of Jack’s arms, the angle of Jack’s collarbone, the mechanical thrusting of Jack’s hips, the Neanderthalesque weight to his brow. It wasn’t the face of a man in the throes of overwhelming sexual ecstasy, and it also wasn’t the face of a man in love. It was—

Indignant, Bitty sat straight up. He knew that expression; it was the same goddamn face Jack made right before he got on the ice. It was—obligation. Responsibility. Duty.

 _What a piece-of-shit motherfucking hard boiled douchebag._

Egg yolk rage, cold and viscous, trickled from Bitty’s cowlick down the back of his neck and pooled in the center of his sacrum. 

Bitty had given this man everything: every horrifying inch of himself, inches that Bitty himself had never had the desire to discover or touch or learn how to squeeze an enema into. The human body contained multitudes and after two years of thorough examination, Bitty was prepared to say that 85% of them were unspeakably disgusting. And, really, Bitty had never expected to enjoy himself in the bedroom, though things had gotten better with continuous practice. Jack was, after all, the more experienced one, the one who got to stick it in wherever and whenever he wanted to—not that Bitty ever minded, or that Jack didn’t listen when Bitty didn’t want to ruin his hair, but it was the fucking principle of the thing.

Bitty was a hot piece of ass because he’d spent years busting his glutes to stay that way. And Jack thanked him for the hours of squats and kettlebells with, what, _wham bam if I have to ma’am?_ What the fuck! 

_What an asshole,_ Bitty thought traitorously. Then he tried it out loud: “What an asshole,” he whispered. Nothing happened. The Earth didn’t even budge a degree from its axis. “What an asshole!” he tried, then again, at the top of his lungs, “What an asshole!”

“Yeah!” yelled an anonymous masculine voice from down the hall. “What an asshole!”

Bitty threw back the covers and whipped open his bedroom door. “What a fucking spit-fisted piss-eating cowardly goddamn asshole!” he yelled as he stomped down the stairs towards the kitchen. The air around him snapped to attention, or maybe someone in the amphibian ranks gasped; Bitty’s vision was black around the edges and he didn’t give a fuck. 

Tango was sitting at the kitchen table with an open mouth and some coverless former textbook in front of him. “B-Bitty?”

“No time for questions!” Bitty yelled. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d allowed himself to yell. Whenever he and Jack fought, they did it in harsh throat-tearing whispers, a mutual safeguard, tacitly agreed upon, against any enterprising coeds with a hard-on for Deadspin cred. He fought with his mother plenty, but he hadn’t been raised to yell at women. And these days he didn’t fight with Coach at all—he hung up the phone or left the room and let the homegrown silence ring between them.

Fighting off the auras of an oncoming stress headache, Bitty surveyed the kitchen. Flour, check. Water, check. Yeast...yeast...thank god, check. There was only one thing to do when he wanted to pummel someone’s face in, and it was the same thing his mother had taught him the week after he was locked in the closet overnight, ha fucking ha. One took a deep breath. One found one’s decorum. One made bread. It would have saved years of grief with Coach if Bitty could have actually broken noses, but he’d had never been tall enough to get the leverage for that, more’s the pity.

The shaggy dough came together quickly. Bitty surveyed the kitchen counter and decided it wasn’t trustworthy; he hadn’t cleaned it in the last ten hours, so there was no telling what had been spilled or splattered and carelessly half-wiped away. He pulled out one of the trusty silicon cutting boards he kept on hand for these eventualities and sprinkled a generous helping of flour over the surface, then dumped the amorphous sticky mess onto it.

Bread always started out unbearable, clinging between his fingers and under his fingernails. Bitty had never thought of himself as the kind of genteel, fastidious Southern queer who couldn’t handle a little elbow grease—though, upon reconsidering the enema, maybe he had misjudged the group as a whole—but he didn’t necessarily enjoy being elbow-deep. There was a kind of savage delight, however, in scraping himself free and kneading the thing down, each strike from the heel of his palm another minor victory. 

“Brah, do you want a beer while we watch this massacre or what?” Bitty heard as from a distance. He didn’t look away from the dough. A phrase floated into his mind, from some unknown origin: [THINGS THAT ARE INFURIATING](https://guerrillasemiotics.com/2013/05/sei-shonagons-lists/). A list began to coalesce unbidden: Jack fucking Laurent fucking Zimmermann, for one. People using his hard-bought butter as a lubricant, but specifically where he could see, and even more specifically on the worst and most putrid couch in human existence. Actually—“Are you seeing this, too, dude, or is this the weirdest hallucination I’ve ever had? I’m only on like two Adderall”—make that the entire Samwell Men’s Hockey team and associates, with the exceptions of Lardo and Ford who were both perfect if vengeful angels. Okay, and Chowder.

“Bitty?” Chowder said, suddenly close behind him. A hand was gently resting on Bitty’s shoulder. Lord, how long had it been there? “Do you want to put that—uhhhhm, that pie away and maybe talk about something?”

“No!” Bitty yelled, sending Chowder in a flinch away from him. “It’s not a pie!” he added. Never mind! Add Chowder back to the list! Add that stupid team captain meeting; the other members always made Bitty feel inadequate, with their calm discussions about team unity and their casual abilities to ask after people’s pronouns in a way that didn’t seem awkward or intrusive! Add everyone who’d ever looked at him funny or asked if they’d seen him on TV—add Aunt Judy—oh lord, add the Sluts—add the childhood rabbit who’d been eaten by a fox, add the cat run over by a car even after Bitty had warned Coach that the cat had grown up indoors, add the dog rehomed when his mother turned out to be allergic—add his fourth grade teacher, that bitch Mrs. Petersen— _add the fucking kid who’d locked Bitty in that fucking closet!_

“Dude,” said someone. A freshly cracked PBR tallboy appeared in his view, which meant it was Nursey talking to him. “I get it, man. But you want to mellow out a little while you pound it down?”

Was that supposed to be a gay joke? Bitty stopped himself from asking by tearing the can out of Nursey’s hand and downing half of it in a single Herculean gulp.

“That’s it,” Nursey said, soothingly, “that’s good.”

It was the same thing Jack said to Bitty when Jack thought Bitty had performed some physical feat admirably: when Bitty made a longshot goal or when Jack added a fourth finger. The way Nursey said it was totally different, as if he rested on some rock hard self-certainty that Jack aimed for and inevitably overshot, landing instead somewhere between callous and robotic. Bitty took another sip of PBR. Maybe that was why Jack didn’t want Bitty to move in with him; maybe Bitty made Jack act like that, sound like that. He tipped the can back and let a stream fall into his open, waiting mouth.

“See, alcohol makes everything better,” Nursey said.

“Nurse!” someone hissed. Probably Dex. The beer had loosened some of the insane tension in Bitty’s brain stem, and it suddenly occurred to Bitty that he could look and see who’d spoken. It _was_ Dex. The entire room seemed to sigh collectively in relief as Bitty stepped an inch or two away from the bread dough.

“Not everything,” Bitty allowed, so Dex wouldn’t hit the speed dial he undoubtedly kept to campus police. Although Dex was often a completely alien creature to Bitty, there was something in him that Bitty recognized—a hardwired desire to snitch that had been brutally beaten out of him on the playground and the rink, but the spark of which lived on, requiring only a belief in the basic justice of the universe. Bitty shared that. He, too, had a finely honed sense of fair play, whetted of course on Beyoncé’s tragic loss to Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs.

What Bitty was not sharing was his fucking PBR. “I don’t think so,” he said, as Dex reached out to pluck the beer from his hands.

“I don’t know if you’re in a good state to be drinking, Bits,” Dex said, sober as a judge, of course.

“I’m not,” Bitty said honestly. “But I’m a senior in college and I’ve gotten wasted like a maximum two times in the past entire year so, so—so fuck off!”

“Bitty—”

“Fuck off, okay?” Bitty said to the room at large, which now contained every member of the hockey team whose name he could remember and several who he really only knew as numbers on a line. There was a hot hysteria building in the bridge of his nose and in the membrane beneath his lower eyelids. “Okay?”

“No,” an authoritative voice declared at the back of the crowd. “No, I’ve seen this before. I deal with actors, remember? I know about every kind of breakdown there is,” Ford said, bouncing up the clear path before appearing before her with her usual spiritedly energy. “And being alone right now is almost definitely not what you need.” She landed in front of Bitty, put her hands on his shoulders, and gazed into his eyes with a searing skepticism that burnt him to the core. “At least you’re not questioning your place in the universe because you had to do a Hamlet monologue and you realized you’re not as hot shit as you thought you were.”

“Girl, you don’t have to take care of me,” Bitty said, though he was thanking all the stars in heaven that the pinprick of oncoming tears had shifted instead into a kind of resentful gratitude in her general direction. 

“Girl, I absolutely don’t intend to,” Ford answered, and snapped her fingers. “Boys, I know what we need. And that’s,” she cried, her voice suddenly booming as she turned around and gave them the old razzle-dazzle routine, jazz hands and all, “a kegster!

The room erupted into action around them as Ford turned back to Bitty. “I wasn’t kidding,” Ford said, quiet again. She stared up into his eyes. “I don’t take care of people anymore unless I’m getting paid for it. I’ve done enough of that. But if you need something, consider this a favor extended.”

“Are you speaking as a team manager?” Bitty tried. 

The joke fell flat and slid sideways off of Ford, whose face looked, underneath her theatrical sparkle, older than Bitty had seen it before. Bitty was too distracted by his own family to give much concern to others unless they were potential future in-laws, but in that moment he became uncomfortably aware of the generations of women who had lived as best they could and taught their daughters how to survive the unsurvivable in order for Ford to be standing in front of him. “As a friend,” she said. 

“—I guess you could help me put the bread away to rise.”

“Waste not, want not,” Ford granted, and together, as the rest of the team set about procuring kegs and coaxing hot girls to show up through consensual veiny forearm selfies, they packed the dough into a bowl, covered it, and cleaned the counter from the aftermath of the massacre. “All better?”

Bitty took stock of the kitchen. “Getting there.”

“Good,” Ford said with a grin. She clapped him on the shoulder, then turned away and raised her hands to the party gods, or whoever. “Let’s! Get! This! Party! Started!” she yelled, eliciting a devoted response chant, fist pumps and all, of “Ford! Ford! Ford! Ford!” She ran to meet her adoring public, who immediately and lovingly poured a cup of tub juice over her head as she whooped. 

It took another twenty minutes for the party to start in earnest, which was as long as it took for the women’s soccer team to cross campus in their habitual phalanx and invade, pouring their mysterious elixirs into the tub juice—“Add that bottom shelf gin, baby!” “It’s not from the bottom shelf, I found it on the ground outside! And don’t call me baby!”—and blasting Carly Rae Jepsen and former Drag Race contestants from the Bluetooth speakers. 

Bitty found himself wandering restlessly through the house as night fell and the party grew around him, passing on his way Ford being chairlifted no fewer than three separate times by three separate groups of people, including once without any actual chair. He paced through the kitchen, up the stairs, around the hallway, back down the stairs, through the living room to open the door the porch, where he was confronted by a wall of people and turned around back to the kitchen. On his third circuit he noticed the torn-apart book still on the table. A closer examination revealed it was still his fucking Aristophanes anthology, its pages torn up and covered with pencil scribblings from, evidently, every reasonably literate member of SMH, and a few question marks that were obviously from Tango.

“Seriously?” Bitty shrieked, though it was early enough in the party that no one had yet migrated to the kitchen. If you shout into a room at a kegster and no one’s puking or fucking in it, do you still make a sound? It didn’t seem to Bitty that he had. The terrible whirring fury that had rocketed through him started to trickle back into his consciousness. He snatched up the book and rattled through three drawers looking for the kitchen scissors. It was a direct betrayal of the four years he’d spent attempting to keep people from using them on inedible material, but the circumstances demanded a sacrifice.

The blades were too blunt and the book too thick to make much headway directly, though Bitty tried until the handle creaked. Why the hell hadn’t they bought a second pair of kitchen scissors? A sharper pair, a newer pair, a pair that Bitty didn’t have to pray wouldn’t give them salmonella every time he used them to cut a clever vine shape into his baguettes?

This was the problem with Samwell Men’s Hockey at large. Sure, they could—at Jack’s behest—buy him a new oven. And Bitty was grateful for it! That’s why he spent hours every week making the best baked goods most of them would see in the rest of their lifetimes! But they couldn’t look at the kitchen as an ecosystem independent of Bitty’s existence; they couldn’t anticipate the kitchen’s needs and wants unless they acted under Bitty’s direction. And Jack was the worst of them all, emblematic of everyone in Bitty’s life who needed Bitty to spell every little thing out to them. He’d complained about the scissors a thousand times, but Jack had never gone out to Racist Stop&Shop and bought Bitty a new pair.

Bitty renewed his attack on the book. The handle groaned in protest. Bitty persisted. The pivot squeaked and then the tension abruptly disappeared as the screw broke. “Cheap piece of shit!” Bitty squawked, his body overtaken with a parallel paralyzing frustration as he stared at the dangling blades. “What do I need another useless couple of knives for!” 

But then it occurred to him—Slut the Elder had forced him to sit through every single Harry Potter movie at some point of their shared childhood. Bitty slammed the book back onto the table and shook off the extraneous blade; it clattered to the floor. “Fuck you!” he said, not sure exactly who he was screaming at, almost wishing Ford or Nursey or somebody would come stop him even as he lifted the half-scissor high above his head in violent preparation—

“Uh, hey, buddy,” Jack said from the kitchen door.

Bitty’s wrist spasmed in shock. “Sugar, honey, iced tea!” he yelped, the half-scissor flying off his hand, narrowly missing Jack’s startled face, and lodging securely in the kitchen drywall. 

Jack came farther into the room and looked at the half-scissor. “Is that a weapon or are you just happy to see me.” 

He was using the stilted deadpan that was a sure sign he was trying to be funny. Reporters didn’t usually respond well to it; Bitty, during the semester he was sleeping through Psych 101, had more or less trained himself to find it endearing through using Jack’s body for depraved acts—until he studied for the class final and discovered you couldn’t Pavlov yourself, no matter how many anal beads you stuffed in your partner. “What are you doing here?” 

“So, euh, not happy to see me, then.” 

Bitty might have been ready to kill Jack in textbook effigy, but he didn’t want to be unfair. He took stock of his feelings. Upon closer examination they weren’t particularly hard to interpret. “No!” 

“I’m worried about you,” Jack said, losing the deadpan and switching instead to—

“It’s that face that pisses me off!” Bitty said, pointing at Jack’s captainly grimace. 

“What face?” Jack lifted his hands to touch his cheeks like he was looking for evidence of surprise plastic surgery or something, not that anyone would dare touch those cheekbones unless they wanted every hockey fan in North America to come after them for crimes against humanity. “What’s on my face?”

“Nothing’s on your face, you asshole,” Bitty said, getting het up now. “Nothing different than what’s on your face every time you get out on the ice!”

“I told you that thing with Kent in the locker room only happened once! And we were still in the Q!”

“I wasn’t talking about that.” Suddenly Bitty felt sick. “Oh my god. Has it happened more than once? Are you having fucking orgies in the Falcs locker room?”

“Whoaaaaaaa,” said an obviously drunk softball player, lifting her hands as in surrender and pivoting back out of the kitchen doorway she’d just entered. Out of the corner of his eye, Bitty could see her furiously texting. He just hoped women’s soccer was still uninteresting enough that she didn’t know anyone with a press badge.

“Please don’t shout, Bits.”

“Don’t call me Bits when you’re ordering me around,” Bitty ordered. His cheeks were getting flushed in the horrible bright pink his mother told him was unflattering and Slut the Younger had once lamented didn’t exist outside a Kat Von D palette she couldn’t afford. 

“I—I’m not trying to order you around. I don’t want to order you around.”

“Well, you are. You always are, Jack, that’s what you do. You tell me to eat more protein. You send me eighty thousand roses I can’t possible enjoy and I have to find vases for all of them—”

“You didn’t like the roses?”

“—You tell me we can’t come out—”

“We kissed on national TV last year because you asked me to—told me to—”

“Don’t throw that in my face!” 

“I just came here because I was worried about you!” Jack roared, getting up into Bitty’s face and staring him down. Bitty became abruptly aware that Jack was six inches taller than he was and fifty muscular pounds heavier, not to mention he’d spent the last two years learning every vulnerable orifice of Bitty’s body and exactly how to manipulate them. A clinical part of Bitty noted that Jack’s accent was breaking through, and that the puffy vein in his forehead was visibly throbbing.

“Yeah, speaking of, I thought you were in California for a game—”

“I sent you my schedule, Bittle, we got home last night—”

“So you decide to just stalk me just because I hung up earlier than you wanted me to? Controlling, much?”

“It’s not stalking if I already know where you live.”

“What, were you looking up local police statutes on your way here?”

Jack grasped Bitty’s biceps. Despite the last four years Bitty had spent losing his mind in the weight room, Jack’s hands were large enough that they wrapped most of the way around. “Don’t joke about that kind of thing.”

“Who’s joking,” Bitty said, low, as mean as he could stand to.

“Oh, did you tell him?” Whiskey asked, poking his head around the kitchen doorway and nodding at Jack, who let go of Bitty in a hurry. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Jack repeated, dumbly.

“I talked to Chad and he’s cool with it,” Whiskey explained to Bitty, which did exactly nothing to enlighten Bitty as to what in God’s name they were talking about. “He was getting tired of Tango holding out.”

“Tango?” Bitty said.

“Yeah, you know. He got in his head somewhere that he could, like, hold out on us as a protest—”

“—Even though he was obviously gagging for it,” one of the LAX Chads said, sweeping past Whiskey and tugging him into the kitchen. Their hands were linked, Bitty was surprised to see, though not as surprised as he would have been at the beginning of the semester. “But you know how those two-beer queers are, don’t you?” he said, turning to address Bitty, who blinked faintly.

“Excuse me?”

“Isn’t this team full of them?” the Chad asked, sounding taken aback. Bitty realized he had a faint lisp underneath his accent; he’d never before listened long enough to one of the Chads to notice any of them were from Kentucky. “I thought that was like the whole shtick of Samwell Men’s Hockey. You guys have these huge parties and someone always lies about sucking someone else off. The LAX team is full of assholes, but they never lie about blow jobs,” he clarified, turning to Whiskey conspiratorially. “Or about being assholes.”

“No, this team is not full of—of—what you said!”

“Sheer tokenism,” said the Chad ruefully in the same tone Johnson used to, shaking his head and grabbing Whiskey more firmly about the hips. “So, are you guys up for it? Well, you, specifically, Bittle, obviously. Tops only. There just isn’t any more room for pushy bottoms in this relationship, you know what I mean?”

“I most certainly do not!” Bitty shrieked, his derailed hysteria returning in full force. 

“Babe, I thought you said you talked to him,” the Chad admonished, giving Whiskey a little affectionate shake.

“I did.”

“You didn’t! He didn’t!” Bitty said to Jack, who was watching the whole thing with the same vacant-eyed concentration he used to follow golf programs on ESPN.

“I did.”

“Pushy,” the Chad said, admiringly. “Well, we can go see if Tango’s had his two beers yet.”

Whiskey looked back at Bitty and clearly, obviously dismissed him with the kind of casual disdain that Bitty had been working on for a lifetime but had not yet perfected. “Let’s.”

“Good luck with...whatever’s going on between you guys,” the Chad said, giving them a brisk wave as he ushered Tango back out of the kitchen. 

“Oh my God,” said Jack.

“They wanted to have sex with me?” Bitty squeaked.

“Oh my God,” said Jack.

“I thought I was just being supportive! I thought I was being an ambassador for the LGBT community at Samwell! One in four!” 

“Oh my God,” said Jack, “he thought you were a top.”

“I don’t even really know what that means, Jack, Lord. I tried looking it up after we watched that video with the ball gag and I just found a bunch of useless Reddit threads and Urbandictionary entries.” 

“It means you do the, you know, the—the fucking—”

“I know that part; that’s obvious.”

“What else is there to know?” Jack asked, grim, obviously lying. 

There was a brisk rap on the doorway molding. “You guys are still in here, huh?” the same soccer player asked. “Do you mind if I sneak in and get some water?”

“Don’t take any of the lemon in the fridge, I’m saving that,” Bitty warned her, and jerked his chin towards the stairs to get Jack to follow him towards his bedroom, where he could lose his shit in peace. As soon as the door was closed, he whipped on Jack and pointed straight at the stupidest thing he could see, which was at that moment Jack’s unkempt bangs. “What, you think I couldn’t be a top? Is that why you sounded like that?”

“Bitty—no—”

“Because I could be.”

“You just said you don’t know what it is.”

“I’m plenty inventive.” Jack looked about to protest again, so Bitty stamped his foot on the hollow patch in the floor that made the sound reverberate around the room. “Get on the bed.”

“Look, Bits—”

“I said get on the bed, Jack.”

Jack swallowed, knelt to untie his shoes, and then got on the bed in perfect silence. Bitty reveled in it for a moment; Jack was rarely acquiescent, though he wasn’t a contrarian by nature the way the Sluts were. He simply never understood what anyone wanted from him.

Well, now Bitty was going to tell him what he wanted. He examined Jack with the clinical eye he usually tried to squeeze shut into submission whenever Jack was touching him. If Bitty was an expert in anything, it was the male form at a glance—an impression formed out of a guilty, half-accidental corner of the eye. But even now, an entire year after he came out to the four million people who were watching Falcs win the Cup, he wasn’t used to looking. Jack was contagiously furtive in everything that he didn’t see his father do first.

Objectively speaking, Jack Laurent Zimmermann was a beautiful man. Even nervously sweating through his ugly socks on Bitty’s bed while forty drunk college students are getting freaky to the lesser pop pantheon below them, even with his startling eyes closed, he was too beautiful to bear. The coarse hair on his calves was easier to deal with, so Bitty focused on that instead. He shaved his own most of the time, and it was so pale that, grown long, it was still barely more than a glinting down. Jack’s, on the other hand, was so dark and springy it seemed to contain some mysterious virile energy. Bitty sat next to Jack’s leg on the bed and twirled it around one of his fingers. 

Jack hummed out a breath. Barely audible. Bitty’s rage spiked back. “Don’t make any noise,” Bitty ordered.

“But what if—”

Bitty, possessed beyond his control, hinged downward and bit Jack calf so hard he could almost feel his incisors meet. “Don’t make any noise, I said.” 

The air above Jack’s face changed anticipatorily, although his face didn’t move a muscle. At last, he nodded, a pathetic little stiff-necked movement. 

“Open your eyes,” Bitty said. 

Jack’s jaw clenched, but he opened them. 

“Close them.”

Jack blinked three times, rapidly, like he was trying to blink out a tear, before complying. 

Some arts major in World Lit had mentioned, recently, some kind of [eerie Eastern European performance art](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abramovic-rhythm-0-t14875), entrenched in the squeamish horror that Bitty pictured whenever someone brought up the former Soviet bloc. A woman had stuck herself on a table surrounded by nails or guns or medieval torture devices or something and allowed anyone in the room to do whatever they wanted to her. The arts major then [described in graphic detail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTBkbseXfOQ) how dirty-fisted audience members had cut off her clothes before cutting her neck and threatening to shoot her, which at the time made Bitty’s stomach squirm in what he’d thought was disgust. 

Thing was, the artist had given it all up: she’d invented the game, and she’d let all those people do that stuff to her because it was her idea in the first place. Jack hadn’t given anything up—Bitty had just taken it himself, and greedily. 

Nervous, he imagined a gun pointed at Jack. It made his stomach lurch in fear, so at least he hadn’t become a sociopath overnight because of some dumb arts bitch who didn’t have half the talent Lardo did. 

He tried picturing a knife. Ugh, no. Thank God. He was normal after all.

The next step wasn’t obvious, so unlike their usual timely progression. As in the rest of his life, Jack stuck to routines and superstitions: 1) clothes off, 2) silently stare at lube, 3) slick up, 4) put it in. Bravado aside, Bitty wasn’t sure he wanted to put it in; he’d never put a condom on his own dick before. 

“When you were fucking Kent Parson,” Bitty said, unsure why he’d begun asking or how, exactly, to finish the question. He looked at Jack’s tight jaw, the still-throbbing vein in his forehead. “Did you fuck him?” 

Jack didn’t say anything; his teeth creaked together with the strength of his silence. 

“Jack? Jack!” Still nothing. “Tell me or I’ll call him up and ask him myself.” 

“My phone is locked,” Jack mumbled.

“I know your passcode,” Bitty said, which had been true six months ago but might now be a bluff, though by the look on Jack’s face he suspected Jack hadn’t changed his passcode since he got a lockable phone in 2011. “So tell me.”

“—He fucked me,” Jack said, at last, voice raw like Bitty had torn out his throat. 

Feeling suddenly and strangely shy, Bity asked, “Did you like it?”

Jack turned his face as far into the pillow as it would go. Mouth shut tight. Another cold wave of rage rammed Bitty’s elbow into the hollow underneath Jack’s rib cage; even now, here, he wouldn’t let Bitty in? What an asshole! 

“Did you like it, Jack?”

His face still hidden by pillow, Jack nodded. 

Forgiveness like honey gathered in a sticky knot in the back of Bitty’s throat—“Baby, you could have said,” he admonished, gently rubbing the bite mark on Jack’s calf. 

Jack shrugged, a tiny violent gesture. “Kent knew more than I did. I knew more than you did.” 

This wasn’t arguable, unfortunately. Bitty had a decent imagination for someone forced to sit through eighteen years of weekly sermons on the dangers of imagination, but there was a reason he was a baker rather than a chef—he preferred the scientific precision of popovers, the perfect ratio of ingredients discoverable with three different recipes to tweak, to creating from whole cloth a dish suspended unpredictably between disaster and genius. And nothing could have prepared him for the squelching. 

“We could have talked,” Bitty pointed out. “You could have explained.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m serious, Jack.”

“ _When_ ,” Jack groaned. 

“—Before we started.”

“When your heart was beating like a little rabbit’s? When you were too embarrassed to make noise?” Jack wrenched his eyes open and stared at Bitty. Sometimes Jack seemed half-steps out of touch with reality as Bitty knew it, missing some kind of fundamental armor that everyone else had learned to put on when they learned how to walk and talk. “How could I say anything that would make it seem like I didn’t know what to do, euh, Bittle?”

“You could have tried.”

“No!” Jack sat up, getting in Bitty’s face so that the forgiveness in Bitty’s throat hardened and transmuted again into something else. “I couldn’t have.” 

“Why not?”

Speech seemed to have abandoned Jack once more, so Bitty pushed him away and got off the bed. “Get undressed,” he said. “Just fucking take your clothes off, you selfish piece of shit.”

Jack stared at Bitty a little longer. In the artificial light of the bedroom, his eyes were washed out to their palest blue, set deep in his very pale face. The thump of the EDM below provided a surreal soundtrack as Jack grabbed the toe of each sock to pull them off, then shimmied out of his T-shirt and hideous jorts, then, glancing at Bitty for validation or something, skinned off his boxers. Despite the approaching end of the Falcs’ season, when players were struggling through disgusting mounds of chicken to keep on the pounds that provided them leverage on the ice, Jack was still so muscular that he barely looked naked, except where his dick flopped sadly between his legs.

Bitty did not want to see his own streamlined muscle, hard-won but pathetic, next to Jack’s hulking masculinity, so he pushed Jack down on the bed and took his dick in his hand. He was very familiar with Jack’s dick, having stuffed most if it in any orifice that would take it, and he knew how Jack liked to be touched—or maybe he only thought he did. He knew how Jack said he liked to be touched, quicksilver tenderness in the hurry to orgasm. 

“What as that poem you recited me, the first time I sucked you off?” Bitty wondered aloud. 

Jack opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“You can talk for now,” Bitty added magnanimously.

“Baudelaire. I always forget the title.”

“It had ‘gay’ in it as I recall.”

“Yeah, but not like in English,” Jack said, his tone too pointed, like he thought Bitty was an idiot just because he spoke one language. 

For that, Bitty pinched the tender skin at the base of his cock. “Not my fault I was raised in a strong country with wide borders and no need for a second language. Tell me the poem again.”

“The whole thing isn’t memorized.”

Bitty reached further down and squeezed until Jack’s face tightened on the edge of pain. “So tell me what you know, then. Try to make this sexy for me in any way, for once, will you?” 

“It wasn’t sexy the first time?” 

“Oh, hon,” Bitty said. He let Jack go completely and pushed him down onto his back. “Come on. Tell me again.”

“Ta—ta tête, ton geste, ton air sont beaux comme un beau paysage,” Jack started, haltingly, as Bitty considered his options and at last put his teeth very gently on the veiny underside of Jack’s cock. “Le rire joue en ton visage comme un vent frais dans un ciel, euh, clair.” 

Bitty removed his teeth, took Jack’s hand in his, and wrapped it around Jack’s own dick. “You gotta keep this up for me,” he explained, “I need my hands.” Jack nodded and, despite the ribbons of awkward tension keeping his shoulders yanked up around his ears, obediently kept his hand in position.

For as long as they had been fucking, Bitty had thought that in everything but hockey and sex obedience was Jack’s natural state. He was so clearly following instructions, usually badly—some internal manual with chapters on How To Make Friends, How To Frame A Photograph Of A Goose, How To Make A Boyfriend Happy. Maybe it was more complicated than that. As he rummaged in the nightstand for his seen-better-days bottle of KY, Bitty wondered who, exactly, Jack had been obeying.

It hadn’t been Bitty, that was for sure. “Didn’t I tell you to keep saying that poem?” 

“Yeah, right, okay,” Jack said under his breath, just like he used to years ago when one of the coaches told him to _light a fire under your ass, Zimmermann, we don’t have all day here for you to lollygag around the goal!_ “Ces shorts sont l’emblème de ton esprit bariolé; fou—oh, oh, oh—dont je suis affolé, je te hais autant que je t’aime!” 

“C’mon, honey,” Bitty cajoled, two fingers in and feeling all right about it. There was a strange doubled sensation, a pleasure once removed and then the objectively disgusting fact of cramming two jellied-up fingers into another man’s rectum. Belatedly, Bitty remembered the condoms in the drawer, but it was too late: his hand was bare and touching Jack already, nothing between Jack’s wet nerveless interior and Bitty’s instinctual come-here gesture. “Is that good? You like it?”

Jack nodded like he was fast retreating somewhere Bitty couldn’t follow, though given what Bitty knew about Jack’s mental landscape he was as happy to remain an observer tethered only by his fore and middle fingers. 

“Keep talking, Jack, so I know you like it.” 

“What do you want me to say?”

Bitty’s consumingly red anger had subsided, but a little leftover crackle of frustration brought Bitty’s free hand from bracing his weight on Jack’s knee to twisting the delicate skin on the inside of Jack’s thigh, a movement Bitty had only before experienced from the other side in a childhood littered by swirlies and purple nurples. “Don’t act stupid, Jack.”

“Right, right—le printemps et la verdure ont tant humilié mon cœur, que j’ai puni sur une fleur l’insolence de la Nature—euh, Bitty—”

Bitty stopped the slow pump of his fingers, three-edging-on-four, and looked at Jack’s face, which was red and screwed tight in pleasure. “Yes, Jack? You want me to stop? ’Cause that’s what I’m hearing.”

“No, no, no—”

“Well, then you know what to do,” Bitty said, ramming his pinky in without warning so that Jack’s whole body torqued jaggedly around the lynchpin of Bitty’s grip. 

“Ainsi je voudrais—une nuit—faire à ton flanc étonné—”

“Yeah?” Bitty asked, though he had no idea what Jack was saying and relatively little interest in doing the work to find out. Jack had texted him [a list a of translations](https://fleursdumal.org/poem/138) that Bitty had never bothered to read, lost now in the crowded history of their messages. It wasn’t the words Bitty cared about, anyway; it never was. If Bitty had allowed his world to be built by words, he would have been reduced to Aunt Judy’s Jell-O Jubilee Salad by third grade, when he found out what a faggot was, and when his father taught him how to reduce swelling by swiping a bag of frozen spinach from the kitchen while his mother’s back was turned. 

“—une blessure large et creuse—”

“That’s right, Jack,” Bitty crooned, leaning forward on his knees now, predatory. Jack’s hips ached upwards. Bitty shot a glance around but there was nothing—no pillow, no blanket—until he saw Señor Bun and stuffed him, for lack of a better option, into the empty space beneath Jack’s desperate lurching. It was inadequate support, but Jack didn’t seem to care, lost now to Bitty’s seeking fingers.

“À travers mes lèvres nouvelles,” Jack huffed, grabbing blindly at Bitty’s shoulder and pulling him in. “Bitty, Bitty, m’infuse—ton venin—mon cœur!” he said, and came.

It was quick work, above Jack’s dazed form, to unzip his jeans and come on Jack’s stomach, kneeling over him while Jack, vacant-eyed, held onto his thighs with the weak grasp of a newly changed man. Bitty had never been responsible for clean-up before, either, and Jack was silently but clearly incapable of doing anything right now but lying on Bitty’s bed and drifting. He snuck to the bathroom and stole one of the dingy communal washcloths—usually he eschewed their use, but he was behind on laundry and ejaculators couldn’t be choosers—plus a roll of toilet paper from under the sink.

Under his ministrations, Jack started to stir back to life, rubbing at his eyes and staring down at his naked body in something approaching confusion. “We’re all done?” 

“For now,” Bitty said, removing his grimy boxers and jeans and kicking them into what had become the laundry corner. Downstairs, the music was still raging, but he had no interest in venturing back down to see who Chad and Whiskey had roped into their depraved orbit. He looked down at Jack’s prone body, limned by the ancient 40 watt bulbs that had probably been in the room since the Haus was built. Encouraged by the endorphin rush, Bitty saw Jack not as well-loved Jack but as a series of unknowns: a body, alarmingly beautiful, out of focus and awash in golden hour light; a mind, unguessable, maybe unlearnable, but—framed by the innocent way Jack was rubbing at his eyes—in its way endlessly lovable. “What am I gonna do without you?” Bitty sighed.

“Why—would you be—without me?” Jack asked, groggily. 

“Well, Jack, hon, when I have to go back to Madison after I graduate—”

Jack’s expression stretched almost beyond the confines of his face into shocked horror. “You’re not moving in?”

Bitty felt, underneath the layers of love and post-coital satisfaction and thesis-related existential despair, a glimmer of self-righteous pity. “Oh Jack! You never asked me to.”

But Jack didn’t do any of the things Bitty might have wanted him to, when he was picturing this moment any of the dozens of times he had pictured this moment: he didn’t grovel for forgiveness at Bitty’s feet; he didn’t cry in shame; he didn’t even get angry. He just shook his head. “Yes, I did. We talked about it.”

“We didn’t talk about any such thing!”

“We did,” Jack insisted, coming further into his body as he sat up and grabbed Bitty’s forearms. “Last summer.”

“Last—summer? What?”

“After the Cup, Bits, don’t you remember?”

“What are you talking about?”

“After the Cup party. You were at my condo and I said, wouldn’t it be cool if we won next year, and you said, yes, and I said, it would be extra cool if when we celebrated winning that you didn’t have to travel to celebrate, and you said, yes, and I said, okay, let’s do it.”

“—Jack, that doesn’t count as talking about moving in together! I barely even remember having that conversation!”

“You don’t remember me asking you to move in?”

“You didn’t ask me!” 

Jack stared at Bitty for long enough that Bitty wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Naked and freshly washed by Bitty’s own hands, he looked different than he had as he followed Bitty up the stairs. Bitty held his breath. “Okay, then,” Jack said, his body perfectly still. “Will you move in with me?”

“Oh, Jack!” Bitty said, a second overwhelming flood of endorphins engulfing him, “Yes, yes, of course! Yes!” He reached out, threw his arms around Jack’s stiff shoulders and squeezed until he could feel Jack’s muscles unlock involuntarily, a massage of an embrace. “I love you so much, Mr. Zimmermann.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Jack said, his eyelashes casting a little frown on his cheekbones. “Too much like my dad.”

_X_

Dear Nikki and Sammi, 

Thank you so much for your delightful housewarming gift. I was so grateful that you travelled all the way up from New York in order to celebrate my new home with Jack. Sammi, are you enjoying your summer living with your older sister? Good luck with your internship. Y’all are so brave, I myself could never live with anyone or finish any work unless I had my own space to do it in. I barely finished my thesis, I never could have done it with a relative in an apartment as small as Nikki’s. 

Jack and I will really get more use than you can imagine out of these infused cooking oils you bought us. We will have to be creative, as you know I am a better baker than I am a chef.

Please give our love to your parents, but please also let Aunt Judy know we do not have any more room for her very kind homemade-jams-of-the-month. I tried to tell her recently but she must not have understood what I was saying because I got some quince preserves in the mail just yesterday. 

Love,  
Eric

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang on [tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)!


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